


Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Yourself* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)

by KuriNCIS (KuriKoer)



Series: Wake Up Call [10]
Category: NCIS
Genre: Orientation, Other, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-30
Updated: 2012-10-30
Packaged: 2017-11-17 09:12:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/549965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KuriKoer/pseuds/KuriNCIS
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been a long time coming. Tony sees a therapist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Yourself* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)

**Author's Note:**

> _Quote, Masquerade (7x14):_
> 
> _McGee: See, I get a signal over here. Closer to the car, drops off in inches._  
>  DiNozzo: Yeah, I got a dead spot like that in my therapist's office.   
> McGee: Therapist? 

They start by talking about his mother. It's cliché, and Tony doesn't really have much to say. He was too young. The therapist doesn't pressure him.

Next they talk about his father. He does have a lot to say about that, but keeps circumventing the real issues. Keeps trying to paint a rosy picture, because really, he wasn't beat up, wasn't abused, wasn't terrorized or bullied. He keeps saying things like 'but he had a job to do' and 'he did his best for me'. The therapist nods with compassion and understanding. It makes his skin crawl. He glances sideways and makes a stupid joke. He starts telling her about father figures in classic Westerns. Absent ones.

They talk about his intense dislike of therapy, therapists, and psychology as a profession. Then he grins and makes it all go away with a joke. The therapist smiles and says, "So why now?"

Tony chews his bottom lip and tries to tell her the photograph on her wall is influenced by Buster Keaton and is a really strange thing to find in a therapist’s office, and he tells her there's a spot in the waiting room where cell reception is dead to the world, and then he tells her it was time.

"Because I have to face myself, I guess. I think about how criminals think and I don't think about how I think. Does that make sense?"

"All the sense in the world," she says.

They talk about women. They talk about Jeanne; he never mentions her name. He can't mention details about the job that entailed meeting her, wooing her, lying to her. How she came to hate him.

"You're not giving me the full story," the therapist says gently.

"Can't," he says honestly. She works with military and federal personnel often. She knows he can't share everything; he wonders how much she guesses.

"Go on," she says.

They talk about women. They talk about men.

Not really; Tony says, "A lot of boys experiment a little, right?"

She nods. That's pretty much all he says about men. For the longest time.

They talk about his work, skirting the issues. Talk about losing colleagues, friends. About losing trust, and gaining trust. About how sometimes you just want someone who will be there for you, no matter what.

"Everyone wants that," the therapist says. "Doubly so when your life depends on other people all day, every day."

He nods. He feels something balled up in his throat, something that tastes suspiciously like tears.

They talk about ways to express emotion. Ways to express humor. Ways to express desire. Appropriate ways, inappropriate ones. It's nothing like the sexual harassment lectures at NCIS. And Tony understands that sometimes, in his fear, in his own weaknesses, he treated women in a way that was nothing like the way he treats people.

They talk about expectations. About humor as a defense mechanism. About being the class clown.

"It helps everyone around," the therapist says, "when someone jokes to lighten the mood, allowing them to act more adult, more serious."

Tony nods in full agreement.

"Most people wouldn't take the time to wonder how much their relief is a burden on someone else's pain, or what the class clown has to give up in order to make it easier for everyone else."

Tony frowns.

"It's not so healthy for _everyone_ ," the therapist says gently.

They bring up his fears again. He talks about Jeanne again, but instead of only saying how she felt, how he thinks she felt, he talks about how _he_ felt. How hard he worked to make her like him, how it was to be liked. How terrified he is that this was his last chance.

They talk about age, about getting older, about vanity. "It's not a midlife crisis," he feels a need to say.

"No, I know," the therapist says all too calmly. "It's something you've always had."

They talk about the time that passes and the choices he made with his career. They talk about ambition, and about contentment. He looks in the mirror and what does he see there, he looks at his resume and what can he tell it says between the lines.

She's a kindly middle-aged woman with a ridiculously retro hairstyle, or maybe just old-fashioned; thin line between the two. She has glasses on and chews on her pen. And sometimes Tony's skin runs cold and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end when he guesses just how easily she can see right through him.

He tries not to bring up Gibbs. He tries very, very hard.

"So, this man you told me about," the therapist prods gently. "The one you work with."

"Just a schoolboy crush," he blurts and berates himself for it. He needs to look at it from a different angle. "The thing with trust," he starts, and then finds what feels like sure footing. "I can trust him with my life."

"And the others in your team?", she insists.

"Them too," he says. He'd trust McGee, and he'd trust Ziva to have his back, and he'd trust the others too, though not with a gun, when it came down to it. He knows they won't ever try to hurt him.

"So what makes this one different?", she asks gently. He hates how kind her voice is when she asks these questions.

They talk about his friends. He's still friends with some of the guys from college, one or two from high school, guys who show up and slap his back and play ball once in a blue moon. He still hangs out, more often, with guys from his previous jobs, cops who drop by and play cards and drink beer, and call him up when department parties happen, even though he hadn't been in their department in ages. He's a friendly guy. They all like him.

"Life of the party," he says, smiles broadly, 'cause what bad can she find in that?

She nods and smiles. "That sounds like fun. Good to keep in touch with old times."

"Yeah, exactly," he says, nodding with great feeling.

"And everyday?"

Tony doesn't follow. He works late most days, he doesn't actually go out every night.

"I mean, your free time. When you're not at work. And not dating," she adds like an afterthought.

He shrugs. "Dunno. Sometimes drinks with the people from work. Watch a game. Movies. You know."

"With the people from work?"

Tony nods. She writes something in her notepad and then looks up brightly at him.

They talk about what being a grown-up means, and where he'd want to see himself in five years, in ten. In twenty years' time. He brings up all the clichés about a white picket fence and a dog and a grill in the back yard. The therapist doesn't even dignify that with a response.

"Dunno," he shrugs. "Still doing my job."

"Same job?"

"Same job," he confirms. Can't imagine doing something else.

He can, if he tries, see some future with a partner, a wife he thinks, maybe, but not one from a 1950's comedy, no; a vague form of someone to be there, so his apartment isn't so lonely anymore. Maybe a house. Not a picket fence. A safe with two guns in it, maybe. Someone to understand him. Someone to sit with him and watch the same movie for the twentieth time.

"Companionship," he says.

"Love," she nudges.

"Yeah, whatever," he grumbles, well aware that he sounds fourteen and not caring because saying it like it's real will burst the soap bubble, and then where would he be.

They talk about his professional aspirations, then.

"Gibbs is my role model," Tony confesses. "Except the drinking. And the horde of ex-wives," he adds with a chuckle, "and carpentry."

"Your father also had many wives," the therapist mentions.

"It's not that kind of role model," Tony says, shrinking.

"And an expensive taste in drinks," she recalls.

"Gibbs doesn't have an expensive taste in anything," Tony giggles, thinking of bourbon in dusty jars and of ten-in-a-box underwear. Then he sobers up. "He's just a guy's guy. It's a guy thing. He's The Guy."

"And you?", the therapist prods.

"I try to be," Tony says honestly, and that's the first time he admits, even to himself, that he feels like he has to measure up.

He brings it up again a week later.

"He's reliable. Strong. He's the perfect investigator, you know? Dream detective. He's a marine," Tony laughs, "which is, you know, a little too strict for me..."

The therapist chuckles with him, but her eyes are thoughtful when she makes a little note. Can't be more than a couple of words, Tony notices. He frowns for a moment, curious to know what it was, but then lets it go. Returns his mind to Gibbs.

"He's got mad skills," he says simply, "and I'd trust him with my life."

"And you want to be that trustworthy," the therapist encourages, "that reliable."

"Yeah."

"At work?"

He swallows a little and nods and looks away.

"But not only," she prompts.

"I was a cop most of my adult life," he says lightly, "the whole truth and justice thing..."

"Serve and protect," she interjects.

"What?"

"Truth and justice is Superman. Cops, I think, serve and protect." She smiles.

He starts telling her about Christopher Reeve.

She tries to talk to him about deflection and misdirection.

They talk about his need to lie to be liked. "Almost pathological," he smiles.

"Let me be the one to choose clinical terms," she says mildly.

He lied a lot as a child. "To survive," he says. "Boarding school, you know."

She nods.

He liked to pretend a lot. Play someone else. "Like acting," he says, "like movies and rock stars. A lot of kids do that. All kids do that, don't they?"

"Yes, it's very normal," she says in a calming tone that bothers him. "It's a part of the healthy process of finding out who you are, growing up."

He likes to know a lot about other people and for them to not know a lot about him.

They bring up Jeanne again, and there's no bitter feelings. He just tries to figure out why he thought his best relationship was one where he wasn't him.

They bring up work again.

"Undercover, you gotta be someone else. Or you die."

She nods.

"But on the other end of the scale," he analyzes, "there's things like stakeout, where you gotta be yourself more than any other time." He thinks about it while she waits patiently. "Any other time when you're with people," he amends.

"But alone at home, you're more yourself?", she asks.

"You're one kind of yourself," he says, thinking about quiet evenings on the sofa. "Stakeout, that's yourself, extreme version. Hours in a small space with someone else. And other things at work. You get to think with the other person. You gotta stay with them. Have their back. They have yours. It's a kind of yourself..."

He feels like he's heading towards a revelation, but it slips from him.

"The kind of yourself that relies on other people and have them rely on you," the therapist says.

Tony nods.

"Trust is important," she says, and he finds out that in a weird, unexplained way, he trusts her. Not like he trusts his team, never like that, but he trusts her in a way he never thought he'd ever trust a psychologist. Ducky doesn't count, 'cause he's Ducky first, and psychologist later. But he trusts this woman enough to try and tell her more things than he's ready to deal with himself; he trusts her to help him.

He talks about men. Finally. He brings it up and fiddles with his fingers and a piece of string, and looks down on the geometric design on her carpet and waits for a laugh, or for something. Waits for her to tell him he's too old to be having these thoughts like they're new.

"You don't need me to tell you it's normal," she says in a very calm voice.

"That's not the point," he says.

"What's the point, then?"

"I'm forty," he laughs nervously. It's rounding up. Rounding down, really.

"And?", she keeps the same very calm voice.

"And I never slept with a man," he says too quickly. And it's true, but it isn't, or it isn't really, and he remembers all the jokes about Bill Clinton's not-sex. He did not have sex with that man in the bathroom in Arizona. And he did not have sex with the other boy at school when they pulled on each other's cocks like it was their own and closed their eyes, and he opened his and sneaked a peek to see the other boy looking back. So that was that.

"I'm sorry," the therapist says, and Tony's eyebrows hit the ceiling, "because it sounds like you want to."

Then they talk about something else. For the whole hour, and for the hour after it, the next week.

And then he says, "It's not that the work environment is unsupportive."

The therapist nods like she follows his train of thought directly from the station they left in a hurry two weeks ago.

"Or that I got anything to prove to anyone," he says and thinks, briefly, about his father. Then he thinks of Gibbs, and he chases that thought from his head.

"Least of all to me," the therapist says gently. Daring him.

He talks, a little defensively, about how he liked the women he'd been with very much. Maybe even loved. Definitely cared for. And _most definitely_ was attracted to.

"That's good," she says, tapping her pen against her lip, "because I'd hate to think you were having so much sex without enjoying it."

That pauses him. He giggles nervously and says, "Maybe we should talk about work again."

She nods like it's all the same to her and says, "You spend most of your time there, right?"

Tony nods.

"You can meet women at work," she says; stating, not asking. "Can you meet men there?"

Tony gulps. The therapist is waiting patiently.

"They'd all be straight, won't they?", he eventually stutters.

She shakes her head. "Probably not all," she says with a chuckle, "although I can see how you'd be worried about finding out the hard way."

Tony nods so enthusiastically his neck hurts. When he catches himself doing it, he stops awkwardly.

The therapist is scrawling something in her notepad. Then she smiles up at him.

"For the next week," she says, "try to see other men as potential subjects of interest, without fearing that they may be heterosexual, or may be violent, or may mock you for attempting to connect with them."

He looks at her like she just told him that for their next meeting he should bring a tamed lion and a crocodile.

She smiles again. "I didn't say you should approach them. Just try to _see_ them."

The next time they talk, he sighs.

"I have a ridiculously huge amount of good looking men in my office," he tells her with a bit of a grin which he hopes looks casual and confident, and not terrified and exhausted.

Her grin, on the other hand, doesn't look fake. But then, she's a professional, he thinks. "Did you notice what you said?", she asks.

He frowns and tries to figure out what she means.

She quotes it back at him. " _I have..._ a huge amount of good looking men."

"Ridiculously huge," he corrects weakly, feeling his lips dry, and then adds in a hurry, "amount."

She chuckles. "Were you afraid?"

"Yes," he admits.

"And why?"

There are long moments of silence and he hopes she'll break first, but that doesn't happen.

"Because they're _men_ ," he finally says, exasperated.

She doesn't seem impressed. "Yeah, and?"

He feels intense relief when his phone rings and an emergency call is issued. "Saved by the bell," he tells her, quickly picking up his jacket and heading for the door.

She only smiles quietly, and says nothing.

He doesn't shirk the issue next week. He wanted to, but he found something out.

"My boss is hot." Tony lets his head drop between his hands. "All the good stuff I said about him, plus hot. How did I not notice that before?"

"No idea," the therapist says in a tone that suggests she does.

He ignores her and charges on. "Having thoughts about your boss is reason enough in itself to go see a shrink, isn't it?"

"Probably not," she says easily, "if he's really hot."

He pauses and grins. But then he shakes his head. "Seriously. It's a problem."

"Why is it a problem?", she asks in an innocent voice that is meant, he knows, to prompt him to think things through, rather than really ask a question.

"I can't afford to be distracted," he comes up with a brilliant explanation, "in my line of work."

"You weren't distracted for how many years?", she points out.

"I didn't know he was hot then," Tony insists. He feels like an ass. He should've noticed. It's a lame excuse he wouldn't take from a perp.

"And yet he was. So, either he underwent some massive cosmetic surgery... Did he undergo...?"

"No," Tony grumbles.

"Or he was hot all along, and you managed not to shoot yourself in the foot anyway," the therapist finishes, stifling a chuckle. He appreciates the attempt. "So, what's changed?"

Tony tilts his head. "I was straight," he offers.

This time she doesn't even bother hiding her laughter.

"Okay, but I thought I was," he amends, thinking of Gibbs. "And he was. He _is_."

"And if he wasn't?", she prompts.

"He is," Tony dismisses the thought. An image pops to his mind unbidden, Gibbs alone in his basement, building a chair. "Trust me. Anyway, that's a good thing. Means I can put the crazy thoughts away, pretend they don't exist, because there's no chance of anything happening. Unrequited, but not in a Fatal Attraction way, more, uh... Casablanca. Bittersweet."

"Bogie and Ingrid, or Bogie and Rains?", the therapist asks innocently.

Tony glowers, because classics should be respected.

"Anyway, in Fatal Attraction they did have sex. Just not...."

"Yeah, but it ended ugly. And Gibbs doesn't even have a pet. He has a boat," Tony says, thoughtful. "If I went crazy and set fire to it or something, I don't think he'd hold back on strangling me."

She chuckles. "Maybe you should consider looking more into happy-ending romantic comedies," she suggests. When he leaves her office this time, he's actually feeling a little better.

He tries to pick up men but is always hesitant, deterred. He doesn't dare approach anyone unless he's sure they're gay, first. He sits at a bar once or twice, but doesn't want to make a move because he doesn't know the steps to this dance, doesn't know who hits on who, if there are rules, what's polite to say, and just how fast it could go from first date to bed. He doesn't want to make mistakes or lead someone on. At least that's what he tells himself.

"Maybe clubs?", the therapist suggests. "You can just dance there, and there will be less pressure."

"I hate going to clubs," Tony cringes. "They're all so young and pretty, and use poppers." He chuckles. "And if I act like myself, they think I'm a narc."

He doesn't want to act like someone else to get affection. That much they've already covered. He doesn't want to make the same mistake again.

He thinks about online dating, but it gives him the creeps. He thinks about cruising, but encounters the same two problems as before; either they think he's a narc, or he's afraid they're really only there for a midnight jog. Either way, he's alone at the end of the night.

"Maybe you should just wait until you meet the right guy," the therapist finally says. "It's not a race. You're not trying to catch up. It's enough for now to just get over your fears, so that when the right man arrives, you'll be able to let him in."

At the look on Tony's face, she scribbles something in her notepad.

And then adds, "...Into your heart, I meant."

He grins and she shakes her head and he knows he's acting juvenile, but sometimes, not always, not even often, but sometimes, that's just who he is.


End file.
